Leap of Faith: A Spiritual Invitation

[author_by_night]

In today's world, sharing your beliefs is taboo. If you do share them, you are judged, you are told not to share them so loudly, and there are hateful people who actually do horrible things to people of different faiths than themselves.

A few years ago, I did a Livejournal Invitation wherein people shared their beliefs. The purpose was to express your beliefs - whether Christianity, Islam, Taoism, or even Atheism - without fear of condemnation, without fear of judgement. I learned so much about my flisters, and about faiths I knew little about or had never heard of at all. I am going to open the invitation once more.

Say anything, anything at all. And your beliefs do not even have to be specific to a religion - if you believe in reincarnation, if you believe in ghosts, if you believe in parallel universes... those may not necessarily be tied to a religion, (although they may be), but they are still beliefs, and I'd like to hear about them. 

One warning, however - I will state that this is not a debate. We are not here to condemn other beliefs - only to express our own.

Comments

[ehnel.livejournal.com]

I was brought up with a background of generic protestant Christianity, specifically with influences from the Church of Scotland, though this all came to me through school and friends - religion never really happened at home. I know that Dad is interested in Buddhism, and I know that my mother is highly qualified in astrology (the proper stuff: not the fake stuff mass-fed to the public in "spiritual" books, etc) - but I've no idea where they stand on God, and that doesn't bother me, because religion - as something personally applicable to me - is not a part of my life. I have a strong sense of ethics and morals, why do I need religion? I guess that I won't ever know unless I begin to have faith. :)

As someone studying archaeology I am also hugely bothered by a lot of the things about religion. Obviously, I have to immediately relegate most of the bible to legend and myth. Ditto for pretty much every religious text ever. Furthermore I see people in the past existing perfectly happily without Christianity/Islam/Hinduism/any religion at all, or there's evidence of religions completely unconnected to anything like the ones prevalent today. There's a lot of fascinating thought-fodder there - the evolution of styles of religion is really interesting. (You tend to get evidence of shamanism in hunter-gatherer societies, things like hunting prayers/magic - it's all connected to their daily lives. Early agricultural societies go for a pantheon connected to farming. As societies get more complex deities tend to get more and more remote from people, so you have Greek pantheons of more "abstract" qualities like Love, War, Wisdom - and lastly single deity religions, focused on a sole all-encompassing deity. What's next??) As an archaeologist, therefore, I can't help but see religion as a product of culture - invented, in other words. An ecofeminist sci-fi author who I rather enjoy reading (Sheri S Tepper) had an interesting idea in one of her books. Basically it suggested that gods match the cultures who invent them, but sometimes cultures carry those gods with them as they change: so that a very "civilised" culture ends up with a very "primitive" god who might encourage them to make war and conquer their enemies, even though developmentally/philosophically the culture was not warlike.

So, personally, I don't know what I'd call myself. Atheism is a very hard word and there have been occasions when I get a sense of something spiritual, although not in a way I would connect to a single higher consciousness. Agnosticism, to my ears anyway, implies that I am maybe actively looking for faith? And I'm not.

I think people should be able to make moral judgements without having to use a religious text to justify them. That's what my rambling thoughts are coming down to. And I don't care what faith a person has, as long as they are personally decent and do not condemn other faiths/beliefs.

Sorry for the ramblingness. :)